Perplexity-User
Perplexity-User visits a page when a Perplexity user's question needs it, and the answer may link to that page. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or training data, and that because a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt. Only a firewall rule reliably stops it.
What it does
Perplexity-User supports user actions in Perplexity. When someone asks a question, Perplexity may visit a web page to help give an accurate answer and include a link to that page. Perplexity says it is not used for crawling the web or collecting data for training AI foundation models.
Perplexity states that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. A robots.txt group for Perplexity-User is therefore not a dependable control. Blocking it at the firewall makes the fetch fail, so answers about your page are written without it.
In our 2026-11 study, 14.3% of popular sites with a robots.txt blocked it. →
robots.txt token
Perplexity-User
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)How to allow it
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to block it
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /How to verify real visits
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges for Perplexity-User as a JSON file. Match the source IP of the request against those ranges; anyone can send a request that claims to be Perplexity-User, so the user agent alone proves nothing. Perplexity notes the version number in the user agent may change.